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Why Sober Coaches Earn $1,000 a Day

Why Sober Coaches Earn $1,000 a Day

They're paid thousands a day to babysit A-list addicts and boozy B-listers. But what, exactly, do sober coaches do?

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Paypals: Lindsay Lohan, Matthew Perry, and Owen Wilson have all employed sober coaches to get them through the rough spots.

I first became aware of the lucrative sober coaching industry when I was 18 and fresh out of rehab. My roommate, Ella, and I had just moved into a three-bedroom townhouse in California's Huntington Beach, and to make ends meet we invited a girl I'd met at treatment to join us. Like me, Janelle was 18 at the time, and had already been in and out of a long procession of treatment centers without much success. She was a trust-fund baby, a well-pedigreed equestrienne with a penchant for hard alcohol and pure heroin. Ella and I were both crazy in those hormonal, madcap days of our early sobriety, but Janelle was particularly unhinged. She stumbled through a half-dozen codependent relationships and paid thousands to have her prized stallion shipped out to Southern California and stabled near our apartment. But when the horse arrived she simply ignored him. I knew that Janelle struggled mightily to stay sober, but I didn’t realize just how bad things had become for her until a few weeks after I had moved out of the apartment, when Ella phoned to give me a status report.

“I found a sippy cup full of whiskey under the bathroom sink,” she hissed. “And a bottle of gin in a riding boot in the front closet. Dude, she’s on a gnarly bender!”

“Are there still spoons in the kitchen?” I asked. (This was, I had learned, a fairly reliable litmus test of the severity of a relapse.)

“Not for long,” Ella replied, darkly.

The qualifications of sober companions are often dubious. “You are a sober coach if you say you are, but what exactly does that mean?” asks therapist Patty Powers.

A few weeks later, Ella called me again to tell me that Janelle's parents, distraught over her latest relapse, had once again intervened. But this time, rather than sending her back to treatment, they’d decided on an alternate route.

“They just moved a woman into your old room,” Ella whispered. “Her job is to follow Janelle around and make sure she doesn't get fucked up.”

“What?” I replied, incredulously.

“Seriously! She’s like a life coach or something. She gets paid $1000 a day just to slap the vodka bottle out of Janelle's hands.”

“That,” I said, “sounds like a pretty good way to make a living.” I fired up a cigarette and glared at the upscale department store where I was working at my post-rehab “get-well job,” selling off-brand men's "designer jeans" for $10 an hour.

“I guess,” said Ella. “Except you have to hang out with crackheads like Janelle all day.”

She had a point. Maybe, I thought, my shitty retail job wasn’t so awful after all.

Back when I was living with Janelle, "sober companions" were something of a novelty—high-priced accessories who were usually retained by well-known actors and rock stars struggling to maintain their careers. But over the past decade, they have emerged as an alternative to the traditional rehabs or as an extension to conventional treatment. For chronic relapsers, high-profile patients, or addicts with money to burn, they function as a stopgap between rehab and real life. Their tasks range from the mundane (gently reminding a client to attend a meeting in the morning) to the explosive (chaining a padlock on the bedroom door to keep the client from going on a run.) Most people struggling with substance abuse find it most difficult to stay sober when they're alone. For a fee, some people can buy themselves constant company. The company doesn’t come cheap, however. While some sober companions will work pro bono on certain cases, they generally charge between $750 and $1000 a day for their services. Fees for the most prestigious sober coaches (and the most demanding clients) can top $80,000 a month. In return , sober companion accompany their clients anywhere—to parties, work functions, business trips, or just through a typical day, encouraging them in their sobriety and helping them stay clean in a world rife with temptation.

Joe Schrank, a sober companion (and a co-founder of The Fix), describes his job this way: “My primary duty is to provide the scaffolding around someone who is in the early days of their sobriety. I try to build trust, and help my clients normalize the basics of living an intoxicant-free life. In some ways It’s similar to hiring a personal trainer. They can’t lift the weights for you but they can give you the support to lift the weights yourself.” Reportedly, Lindsay Lohan, Robert Downey Jr., Owen Wilson, and Matthew Perry have all employed sober companions, usually at the insistence of Hollywood studios that can’t afford to have their big stars out on a big bender. Increasingly, though, sober companions are working with a more diverse client base.

“I’ve had all types of clients,” says Patty Powers, a New York-based sober coach who has appeared on the A&E series Relapse. “I get a lot of clients who refuse to attend yet another treatment center. I also tend to people who are returning home from treatment, and people who hire me at the suggestion of their therapists. Then there are clients in the entertainment industry who will lose their job if they don’t submit to testing and have a sober companion.”

Sober companions labor under a strict code of anonymity, so they're understandably reluctant to share any details that might compromise the privacy of their clients, but it’s safe to say that their work takes them to locales that are both both grisly and glamorous. "It's a notoriously unpredictable profession," says Schrank. "The truth is, you never know where you're going to end up." One well-known sober coach spent hours trying to convince a wigged-out hooker to return a Super Bowl ring she'd stolen from a well-known NFL player. Soon after, she accompanied another bewigged client to his seat at the British House of Lords. While some sober coaches are called on to rescue their clients from dangerous crack houses and dive bars, others fall effortlessly into their clients' luxurious lives. One sober companion I encountered was recently hired to look after a golf-loving sports mogul. They got along so well that he ended up living full-time at his client's mansion, while collecting a $1,000-a-day fee. He spent most of his time playing golf with his client. A few weeks later, the coach's brother moved in as well.

Another high-tech billionaire asked his sober companion to stay with him during a particularly stressful weekend. When the coach demanded a $50,000 fee, the client didn’t blink an eye. Such exorbitant rates may seem to distasteful to some. But since the relationship between companions and clients is so intimate, it's no surprise that some wealthy clients would happily shell out obscene quantities of cash to keep a good sober companion on hand.

Unfortunately sober coaches can become as much of a crutch for some clients as the drinking and drugging once was. The onus is on the companion to maintain healthy boundaries and an appropriate degree of professionalism—a dangerous position, given how many hustlers there are in the game. Schrank notes that the business isn’t regulated in any way: “There are no professional associations or standards of practice,” he says. "So you have a lot of charlatans in this game."

This Arizona rehab prescribes high doses of AA meetings and backpacking for young guys who not only need to get sober, but also learn the basics (think cooking and cleaning) of living in the real world.

This SoCal rehab fosters a regimented but respectful recovery environment, where teens learn how to live sober through plenty of 12-step meetings and life-skills classes—not to mention "equine-assisted psychotherapy" and mixed martial arts.

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Anaheim Lighthouse is a drug and alcohol rehab with a more residential feel to it than many of its competitors. The suburban surroundings are replete with palm trees and green lawns, and the houses also have outdoor lounge areas with benches and small decorated fountains.

In addition to the 12-step / holistic therapy approach, what Palm Partners alumni consider the most meaningful part of their stay is the positive relationships built with fellow alumni and a deep love and appreciation of many of the therapists, counselors and techs who work there.

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